Thursday, May 22, 2008

Along with everyone else in the alliance, I’ve been taking a much-needed hiatus from blob warfare, and going on casual roaming gangs instead. Having -finally- taken the time to train up Caldari Cruiser V, I’ve received more than one “HAX” comment when I was spotted in something other than a crow (Thanks “Mr El Paso Jackal”)…

That’s right, after a year of messing around, yours truly can now fly a Cerberus! I’m liking my Lionness very much despite all the malignant comments about the missile HAC. Many people consider the ship no better than a Drake but I beg to differ; my first cerb has survived far more encounters than my big fat heavy drakes, which I used to fly as n00b dps ships until I decided zooming around in a gistii crow was more entertaining (tally: 3 speeding tickets so far). Pilot ability comes into play as well – don’t expect to survive long with up-close-and-personal styles like autocannon vagabonds or blaster megathrons. I fly it like a slippery escape artist and I'm not ashamed of it: lots of manual piloting, toggling my mwd, staying at range from the battlefield, and keeping alignment towards celestial objects. The cerb is really not meant as a heavy assault missile boat with its missile range bonus; use the Sacrilege if you really want to use HAMs. Fit a scripted sensor booster and nano-faggotry modules however, and enter this scene: a haggle of angry homeless dudes (read: vagabonds) are bawling and running at you with the speed of Olympic sprinters, asking for spare change, and you run away while throwing big rocks at them with perfect aim from across the road. A fine addition to any nano gangs. Viva la nanocerb!

Also, things seem to be rather hot in the Drone Regions, which comes as a big surprise to many players. Almost 60 capitals were killed in a big fight between Atlas/Smashkill/FIX and Solar Fleet/Goons/ED/Legion of Death, including a dead Erebus flown by the Goon pilot Deadtear. Props to Smashkill and friends – few expected such concerted war efforts from them.

A friend asked me if I’d like to start up an Eve podcast series with him. I’m quite open to this idea, considering that he would be handling most of the technical details and such, but I simply wonder how long I can maintain the podcast. First of all, I’ll be returning to Asia and traveling extensively in the month of July and August with my family, and they’ve always hated my gaming habits. I don’t even know if I can explain the concept of a game podcast to them without being chased out of the house. I’m also planning on hanging out with a lot of old, old friends of mine from high school years. Secondly, living in Midwest America has increased my affinity for summers exponentially, so I doubt I’ll be gaming much while the sun is out. And while Internet spaceships is serious business, shopping is definitely much more serious for me.

Who knows, we’ll see… If things move along as planned we may be recording our first episode this weekend. Stay tuned!

Now that you have HAC, you should be close to HIC and Recon too. Getting cruiser 5 opens up a lot of doors in a relatively short time. Have fun with the new toys.

As to FW and alliances: I'm just going to use my alt that still has newb skillpoints and fly tech 1 ships to see what it's about. I'm not bringing my main into it unless my corp/alliance crumbles. ...and since we are nearly 1200 people and growing now, I hardly see alliance death as iminent.